The art of war

The original definition of Trench Art was confined to objects made in various materials by soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians between 1914 and 1939. Recently it has been expanded to include any decorative item that is directly linked to any armed conflict or its consequences, in any period.

And as armed conflicts are so common, Trench Art is a correspondingly huge field. Every day, somewhere in the world, Trench Art is bought and sold in flea markets, car-boot sales, militaria fairs and online.

Trench Art can be grouped into three general categories. The most obvious is art made by soldiers during breaks in combat. In the Westhoek area of Flanders during the First World War, many soldiers drew pencil sketches on whatever scraps of dry paper they could find. Or they made simple carvings out of wood, chalk or bone. Some even had time to produce crude metal items, such as rings, crosses and pendants, from bullets and shells. Even today in the fields of Flanders, rusty cigarette lighters, matchbox covers, tobacco boxes and letter openers made from bullets and scrap metal are unearthed by farmers’ ploughs.

Many objects are personalised, engraved with a man’s name, rank and regiment, much to the enthusiasm of local historians. A second category – much larger in terms of quantity – refers to objects made by civilians during and immediately after a war. In Flanders, the civilian manufacture of Trench Art during the First World War quickly became a cottage industry, with items being sold to both Allied and German armies.

After 1918, Trench Art became a means of making a living. Returning refugees discovered that their villages, towns and farms were devastated, and the agricultural land rendered useless and dangerous by saturation shelling. As de-mining brought more metal to the surface, local Flemings made and sold Trench Art to battlefield pilgrims. Many bereaved widows, sweethearts and relatives returned to their homeland clutching an ashtray made from a shell case, an inkwell made from a grenade or a crucifix made from shrapnel as the only material reminder of the dead.

The final category is art made by civilians long after a war has ended, often with the purpose of reminding us about the grim reality of conflict. Into this category falls a collection on display at the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres. Ypres, the Great War and the Re-gilding of the Memory is a retrospective of the work of British artist Stephen Hurst. It includes an extensive overview of sculptures and graphic work, as well as the never-before-exhibited Ypres Series and Diaries.

Encounter with death

Hurst is irrevocably linked to Flanders. His parents travelled to Ypres in 1919, 13 years before Stephen was born. They belonged to the first group of battlefield pilgrims who had many dead to commemorate: a father, a brother, uncles and brothers-in-law. Stephen’s childhood took place in a world that prepared for the next war, and he himself served in Malaysia in the 1950s.

“The experience strengthened his dedication to becoming an artist,” says Piet Chielens, the museum’s curator. “Not to get rid of the war but to comprehend it, to understand the people who fought, worked and lived in it, to depict the cruelty of war and to attack the cynicism of its leaders.” The exhibition includes the Somme Series of sculptures, painted reliefs and research, both drawn and written. First exhibited in the UK in 1977, this was Hurst’s first foray into Trench Art. It partly came about when he fell into a trench while searching for the major mine craters in the Somme battlefield. During his wanderings along the Ancre Valley he was exploring a private wood (ignoring the stern signs forbidding entry and warning of death) when he fell into a ventilation shaft. He was only saved from a potentially fatal fall by his drawing board getting wedged into the shaft. “I cannot swear that it was that close encounter with death, on the site of a battle half a century earlier, that precipitated the Somme Series, but it was one amongst several stimuli,” Hurst tells me at the opening of the exhibition.

In 2009, Hurst started the Ypres Series, which makes up more than half of the retrospective. The catalyst was when Hurst was invited to be artist in residence at In Flanders Fields, a museum devoted to the First World War. Hurst and his wife, Sylvie, lived in a house in Guido Gezelleplein, from where they explored the Westhoek.

Less than noble

The experience was stimulating, if at times harrowing: “I frequently found myself in a small cemetery surrounded by wheat with a soft wind blowing over the bright green shoots,” says Hurst, “reading those familiar regiments and familiar names and, to my surprise, discovered tears running down my face.”

But Hurst is no romantic. His view on war is down-to-earth, based on his own reality of the horrors of fighting in a distant country. He is particularly critical of those who describe young soldiers as making the supreme sacrifice or giving their lives so that we might live.

“Young men did not talk or think like that. They did not ‘give’ their lives,” he says. “Their lives were taken from them, then as now, by a mixture of ingenious and highly lucrative technology and official stupidity. They were slaughtered, shredded in a gigantic meat-grinder.”

In this context it is no surprise that some of Hurst’s most recent work focuses not on the First World War but on later conflicts. They include drawings made in 2003 that “bear witness to the illegal American oil war” (Iraq). Others drawn last year illustrate the murder of British soldiers in Afghanistan by their Afghan allies. This is Trench Art at its most powerful and hard-hitting.

Until 15 September

Ypres, the Great War and the Re-gilding of the Memory

In Flanders Fields Museum, Grote Markt 34, Ypres

www.inflandersfields.be